Today I am collecting light.I am walking outside; senses wide open for the signs of spring.The robin sings, I hear the blackbird and a great tit.The sunbeams shine through the trees around the inflorescence of the hazel...I feel so good.

Out of the wind I roll up the sleeves of my thick sweater; I am knitting: drinking some water, and I am just sitting there so delightfull in the light.You can just feel how good it is...From the house I hear this:

dinsdag 13 februari 2018

What a blow.
On my beloved Kaffe Fassett Collection facebookpage was a post from Liza, in which she told us that Westminster and Free Spirit are being taken over by Coats.

How is that possible. How can they do that.
Off course, economics.
And that is one of the few things I don't understand at all.

But I really really can't believe they are going to stop producing the fabric that brings me so much.

Luckily there are a few things I DO understand and CAN do in quite a good way: blogging, quilting, and being VERY enthousiastic about that.

So.
Here are a few of my happy thoughts about everything brought to me by the Kaffe Fassett Collective.
And pics to make it even happier.

Really, these fabrics have changed my life.
They changed my way of quilting, and when I discovered them it felt like I had been waiting for this exact same fabric all my life.
For instance I had been waiting for fabric to use to make my interpretation of a beautiful work of art: "The 1st 7 days in Your House". Here's the day: there's also the night. This work you can find in the Dom Church in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

I saw this for the 1st time when I just started quilting. My thoughts were: if I EVER find the fabric, I will make it.
And I did...

Can you believe that????
OK, I do not have contact with everybody every day, but I do get a lot of joy and comfort out of you all!

I met Kaffe on several lectures: with Willy, Linda and Wanda in New Jersey:

I met him in the Netherlands too, in Woerden where I met Sandra and her aunt José, and in Staphorst with my friend Marga.
I just loved those meetings, and I shared my joy, enthousiasm and thankfullness with so much of you!

The relationships that seriously developed with those of you I met in real life are just too precious. Some of the others I will meet up with in the future, like BJ!

But the best part of my happiness comes from the fabric itself.
It is so joyous.
It bears enthousiasm in itselfs; otherwise it would not be cherished by so very many people in the world. As I write "In the world" I remember that even in a worldfamous program like Top Gear, shirts from Kaffe's fabric are shown...

My most favourite pieces are I think my coats. One is made from Philip's fabric Gradi Flora Tomato, I made a one block wonder from it, but didn't know what to do with it.
This is the result:

The other coat is not all Kaffe, but there definitely is a lot:

And my shirt:

And how about the challenge to make a silly headcover: I made a "Happy cappy" for me, and got assignements for 8 of them...

My "Fragile", who lives with friend Frank travelled through Europe:

The one I struggled most with: my mediterrenean hexagon... What color to use for the triangles was a BIG question!

I pimped a grocerybag...

I lost my marbles:

I made a tryptich for a dear friend

Even my business card has Kaffe in the logo!

We have a tulip exhibition in the spring...
This one has found its way to the USA, brought by a Dutch woman who thought it was a great souvenir...
My first sold work!

And lately I am working on a Travellers Blanket who I will call "Kaffe meets Dijanne", and I will dedicate it to my dear friend Donna, who introduced me to the concept.

However would those quilts and pretty things be so pretty without Kaffe Fassett Collective fabric?
However will we continue from here?
What scares me is not just that they will stop producing.
What scares the hell out of me is the shopowners that thrive on KFC.
Like my dear friend Anja on Vashon Island.

Please, let there be a way to keep those gorgeous fabrics to continue.

We all, quilters all over the globe want that.
We all who adore Kaffe, Brandon, Philip, and the others from Free Spirit.
We all who can get happiness just by buying, hoarding, and creating beautiful quilts...

And above all, we all who love the connection around the world that those fabrics bring to us!
With a big hug from Zeewolde, the Netherlands, to you, my dear friends where ever on our world!!!

Lately I blogged a lot about rounding up, new starts, things like that.Thats' what you get.What I live, you get to read.Although, no. Not at all everything. I like to keep certain things private.Those things that are nobody's business.Those things are only known to people I love very much.

Anyway.During the last year and a half I followed artclasses, organised by our National Quiltguild.We blogged about that too, but that was only on a closed page.So I didn't share a lot about that.Every now and them some results, like a nice shirt...

In those year and a half we studied a lot: composition, color, lines and points, batik, symmetry, light and shadow, and we all did the best we could to succeed and make the assignements.That wasn't always easy: most of us have busy jobs, and all of us had to deal with worries and caretaking, illnesses, losing jobs, people we love dying, the way it works for women in a certain agegroup.People quit: too busy, preferring to follow their own path, or for other reasons.

I played with that thought myself on a regular basis.It was hard.And the hardest part was always my deepest fear: is what I make, what I do, who I am, good enough?Every time again.Sometimes it was because off an overwhelming, crushing commend from a teacher, sometimes the much better work of one of the other students, sometimes my own powerlessness to make what was set in my mind, but just didn't appear out of my hands.

Coming Saturday we have our last class, and we have an insane amount of work to be done, with a minumum amount of instructions. Here are the assignements:* the last teacher asked us to work with the tribal motives we studied. Make 5 "things" from 1 drawing.* we have to prepare a lesson from about 15 minutes: a leftover from another class where we were taught about teaching.* we have to present the work we made during the year and a half, in a way that shows off the work, tell everyone in a sort of speech about what the classes brought us. We can speech for 5 minutes, then the others may question us for 5 minutes, and then there's another 5 minutes about unfinished work.* the workbook in which all classes are to be found, including processes that describe how we got to the works we made has to be ready too.

En dan last but not least krijgen we op deze dag de eindopdracht, een werk dat in september op de Algemene Tentoonstelling van het Quiltersgilde in de Grote kerk in Deventer wordt gepresenteerd.

And, last but NOT least: on this day we will receive our last assignement: a work that will be shown in our endpresentation at the big exhibition by our National Quiltguild, in the Big Church in Deventer.

You probably get that my fear for failure is enclosed in the amount of work, combined with my impossibility in spatial awareness that you need to present your work as good as possible in a limited, dark room, where all your co-students have to do the same... And then there's that little NASTY voice in my head screaming "nooooooooo not good enough! The others are better!"

So today I work my a** off. I make a big folder from an old movingbox, where I can save my work in and will keep it in one piece. I use a piece of fabric given to me by a former co-worker, and an old jeans I got from a friend.

I collect ALL the material that lays around in my workroom, bring it downstairs, and order it class by class. I printed my blogs earlier on; they tell a great deal about my process. I throw away what is no longer needed.

Sjonge... de hele tafel vol...Boy... the whole table is covered!

En uiteindelijk; opgeruimd staat netjes.... zit alles op de juiste volgorde in werkboek en werkmap.And eventually, everything in the right order in workbook and workmap.

Everything goes through my hands. You see what you made during that time. You reread the things you wrote down during class. The blogs tell it all!I see what brought me joy, I see the things that aren't my thing, I see what makes me REALLY happy en what has damaged me.So I remove some poison, clean up, throw away, and remember what's important for my development toward my autograph as a quilter.

Now I really am looking forward to the last assignement. And to be honest, aspecially to the time after that.When I can make those things that come from deep within. That make me happy. With which I can touch people.

With what did I start these classes?I wanted to learn.And I did.I want to touch people with my work.I am going back to that.More embroidering, by hand and machine, work from within.Yes.That is my autograph.My mission.Bear out light, touching people, give food for thought.